“Mad Max: Fury Road” has been rattling around in George Miller’s head for a long time now, but it was never meant to be the intricate postapocalyptic world it has become. In fact, it originally wasn’t even meant to be set in the future.

When the 70-year-old made the first movie in 1979, he just wanted to make a car-chase film. B-movie fast car/crazy crash-centric movies were fairly common in the late 1970s, including the dystopian future of “Death Race 2000” made in 1975.

Having grown up in a rural town in Australia, “The car — like in America — was a symbol of freedom,” says Miller. “We had these big wide roads that seem to go on forever.”

Though fascinated by movies all his life, Miller took an unusual route to filmmaking. He studied medicine, even completing his hospital residency. There, he encountered the other aspect of the open highway — “road trauma and autocide, as they call it.”

Unlike the other films, which happen decades into the future, the original “Mad Max” was set slightly ahead, when law and order was beginning to break down after an energy crisis. “The budget was so low that I couldn’t set it in the contemporary city,” Miller says. “The story was quite hyperbolic. We could only use back streets and old decrepit buildings, which are cheap to hire. So by default it ended up being in the decaying future.”

The film was reportedly made for less than a half-million dollars and grossed more than $100 million worldwide. The new film, “Fury Road,” is said to cost $150 million. By the way, when “Mad Max” originally played in the U.S., practically everyone’s voice, including Mel Gibson’s, was dubbed to eliminate the Aussie accents.

Miller says he never intended “to make a second one, let alone the third and fourth.” It was only when “Mad Max” became a hit that he began to wonder why it had so much resonance.

“The Japanese saw it as a samurai film. The French thought of it as a Western on wheels,” says Miller. So when he made “The Road Warrior” in 1981, the apocalyptic world he created “was much more deliberate, more explicit. It was about the oil crisis and wars.”

Since then, the filmmaker has seen “Mad Max” elements in music videos, video games, manga and animation, and, of course, other movies. Coming back to the story — “I was reluctant to let it go” — Miller has been able to go further both in the story and technically.

But he says it’s still “real cars, real people in real deserts out there in the outback.” Though there were some suggestions that “Fury Road” should use CGI, Miller resisted. “It doesn’t defy the law of physics. There is no spacecraft. It would be crazy to do it as a green-screen movie.”

In the “Mad Max” world, everything is repurposed. Even Max’s face cage is an old pitchfork, while an electric guitarist’s instrument makes heavy-metal war music and doubles as a flamethrower.

With lighter, smaller cameras, Miller and his crew were able to shoot in places and capture images he couldn’t 30 years ago. New technology also allowed them to digitally erase wires and straps used during elaborate stunts, including a sequence on poles that’s reminiscent of a Cirque du Soleil act.

Since audiences have gotten used to faster editing, the new film has more than 2,000 cuts, averaging 2 seconds and 9 frames — twice as many as “The Road Warrior.”

Tom Hardy, who stars as Max, says when he was making the film, “There is no way I could fathom what I saw on the screen.”

Miller is a real film student. When he talks he references car chases of the silent era, Alfred Hitchcock and quotes the film composer Bernard Herrmann: “Cinema is a mosaic art. It’s all the little pieces that go together that make up the whole.”

In “Fury Road,” the McGuffin — Hitchcock’s term for a device to move the plot along — are the five wives, and he felt it was necessary to have a female warrior like Furiosa handle it. In “The Road Warrior,” Miller had a woman warrior character killed off to subvert the audience’s expectations that she would become Max’s lover, but he always wondered about a woman in that world.

Dressed in a leather jacket with a streak of blond in his hair, Miller may have some of Max in him, but he also carved out an eccentric film career. From dystopia, he eventually went on to produce “Babe” and direct “Babe: Pig in the City” and “Happy Feet.” Some of the attraction was his fascination with technology: “ ‘Babe’ was the beginning of the CGI and ‘Happy Feet’ was at the beginning of motion capture.” The other part of the equation was he had kids at the time.

But since they have grown, he started thinking about Max again. In developing the “Fury Road” story, Miller and his screenwriters have two other possible scripts.

But the filmmaker says he isn’t sure he has “the appetite or not to go back in the wasteland. I have other stories on hold that are going to compete for the time and space.”

Rob Lowman began at the L.A. Daily News working in editing positions on the news side, including working on Page 1 the day the L.A. Riots began in 1992. In 1993, he made the move to features, and in 1995 became the Entertainment Editor for 15 years. He returned to writing full time in 2010. Throughout his career he has interviewed a wide range of celebrities in the arts. The list includes the likes of Denzel Washington and Clint Eastwood to Kristin Stewart and Emma Stone in Hollywood; classical figures like Yo Yo Ma and Gustavo Dudamel to pop stars like Norah Jones, Milly Cyrus and Madonna; and authors such as Joseph Heller, John Irving and Lee Child. Rob has covered theater, dance and the fine arts as well as reviewing film, TV and stage. He has also covered award shows and written news stories related to the entertainment business. A longtime resident of Santa Clarita, Rob is still working on his first more-than-30-year marriage, has three grown children (all with master's degrees) and five guitars.